Semiconductor based integrated circuits used in electronic devices, such as digital processors, include digital circuits based on complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. CMOS technology, however, is reaching its scaling limits for transistor density. Additionally, increasing power consumption and heat dissipation of CMOS-based processors operating at high clock speeds limits their high-performance potential. As an example, servers in a data centers are increasingly consuming larger amounts of power as the data processing demands grow.
CMOS-based processors consumer power even when the CMOS circuits are quiescent, because they require power to maintain the state of the CMOS transistors in the CMOS circuits. Furthermore, because the CMOS circuits are powered using DC voltage, a certain amount of leakage current is always dissipated. Thus, even when such circuits are not processing information, some amount of power is always consumed not only as a result of the requirement to maintain the state of the CMOS transistors, but also as a result of the current leakage.
An alternative approach to the use of CMOS technology based processors, and related components, is the use of processors constructed from superconducting logic based devices. However, unlike CMOS based devices that can operate at room-temperature, superconducting logic based devices require lower cryogenic temperatures to function properly.